ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at representations of nature at the intersection of art and botany, focusing on plant imagery in pioneering printed herbals and florilegia made in northern Europe during the long sixteenth century, especially in the work of Otto Brunfels and Leonard Fuchs. It analyzes some of the pictorial, compositional, and discursive strategies that both shaped and arose around early modern modes of image making. The value of such pictures was predicated upon the firsthand observation and experience of nature, at least in theory, for graphic templates could also be mobilized to filter or inform direct observation. In this framework, image making, through which practices of observation and experience were meant to be stabilized, unfolds as a process of translation performed by artists and botanists. In a phytographic process dedicated to the detailed pictorial description of plants, the observational experience of nature was redeployed on paper, in two dimensions, through various operations of transfers and transplantations.
